Lehigh Valley slips in county health rankings

Study covered nearly every U.S. county.

Union County in central Pennsylvania has some of the amenities that you can find in the Lehigh Valley — lots of outdoor activities, top-notch higher education and even Christkindl markets.

But Union County has one thing you can't find here: the best overall county health rankings in the state.

In the second annual report ranking the health status of nearly every U.S. county, the Lehigh Valley slipped a bit, leaving it near the middle of the pack among Pennsylvania's 67 counties.

"These rankings tell us that where we live matters to our health," said Patrick Remington, professor of public health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

The report was issued by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. It measured factors affecting health such as air pollution, availability to health care, insurance coverage, employment, obesity and education levels. It also considered health outcomes, looking at individual surveys of good or bad health and mental health days, low birth weight babies and premature mortality.

Combined, those two measurements created a county's overall health ranking. Union's neighbor to the west, Centre County, ranked second and was followed by Chester County. Philadelphia ranked last. Just above it were two rural counties, Sullivan in the northeast and Greene in the southwest corner of the state.

In Lehigh and Northampton counties, measurements of morbidity — the relative levels of health or sickness — are cause for concern. The morbidity rank for Lehigh County dropped five places to 37th. Northampton County's morbidity rank fell just one spot — but to 60th.

"When you look at the resources that we have across the two counties, it just doesn't make sense that we're down that low as a region," said Steven Bliss, executive director of Renew Lehigh Valley, a group that has been promoting a regional health department.

Surveys showed 16 percent of Northampton County residents reporting "fair" or "poor" health between 2003-2009, the survey years, far above the benchmark rate of 10 percent. The benchmark rate is where the top 10 percent of counties would fall.

Lehigh County's air quality and the lack of access for many residents to healthful foods dragged down that county's morbidity rank.

The positive spin on those statistics is that death rates, the estimates of lives cut short by these controllable factors, were lower. The mortality rate signals that the local population gets sick or suffers from illness frequently, but gets good care when the problem gets serious enough.

"We've traditionally known that we have wonderful medical and health care systems in the Valley, and that it's a great place to be ill," Allentown Health Bureau Director Vicki Kistler said. "It's not a great place to be healthy."

Behind the data, Kistler added, are people whose lives are being diminished or cut short. "These are people's lives and this is really important work to be done."

She echoed Bliss, saying that the morbidity rate is derived from ailments such as obesity, accidents and violence, which are addressed through public health programs. That, they said, makes the argument in favor of a bi-county health department, an idea that has failed to gain regional approval.

Organizers of the report said patterns across the country showed that counties with large urban cores often had the worst rankings. Rural areas also suffered from poor access to health care and high rates of obesity, they said. Even suburban areas with the best outcomes showed problems with air pollution caused largely by heavy automobile traffic, they said.

Following those patterns, Philadelphia's suburban counties, including Bucks and Montgomery, were sixth and fifth, respectively. But Carbon, with its 61st mortality ranking and Schuylkill, ranked poorly in most measures, came in at 58th and 56th overall.

The report is "a call to action for communities to work together," Remington said, saying the call can be answered by political and business leaders and average residents.

Joe Reardon, the mayor and CEO of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan., said he took last year's report to heart and led a drive to bring all elements of the community into a conversation about how to improve the region's health. The drive brought together business leaders, superintendents from urban and suburban school districts, and even officials from different states, he said in a teleconference with reporters. The key, he said, was showing various constituencies that they had a "commonality of certain interests."